Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a variant of Linley's Dungeon Crawl. It is developed openly and welcomes participation from the community.

As in the original Dungeon Crawl, players are tasked with finding runes to enter the Realm of Zot at the bottom of the dungeon, before returning to the surface with the Orb of Zot. For added difficulty, players can attempt to collect all 15 runes scattered throughout the dungeon.

As outlined in DCSS's design philosophy, the developers strive to create a balanced, tactical game that limits grinding and reliance on out-of-game sources of information in order to progress. The resulting game is more friendly to new players while still requiring a good deal of practice and skill to win.